Withings Steel HR review: Classy on the outside, inconsistent on the inside

Fossil Group may call most of its wearables
"hybrid" smartwatches, but it doesn't own that term. A number of
companies design devices that look like traditional watches but have the
internals of a mid- to high-end activity tracker. Withings has done
this with its new $199 Steel HR, the smartwatch that replaced the
Activité Pop in its wearable lineup. The Steel HR has all the activity
tracking features of the Pop and even the original, luxury Activité, but
it also has a built-in optical heart rate monitor to provide another
level of data in your workout stats. With that extra piece of hardware,
it's supposed to be easier to transition between everyday life and the
gym with just one device. That convenience is undeniable, however the
Steel HR has a few caveats that may limit it in the long run.

Design: A regular watch done right

We officially live in a world where companies
make wearables that don't have to be ugly. Withings always had a knack
for making attractive products, whether it was wearables or smart home
devices. In some ways, you could say it was more of a watch company than
a wearable company when it came out with the expensive Activité a few
years back. The Steel HR is the evolution of that relatively basic
activity tracker into a device that monitors more things than any other
Withings wearable has monitored before—without losing the brand's
timepiece design. It comes in either a 36mm or 40mm case, and the price
depends on the size you get ($179 for the smaller of the two and $199
for the larger). Besides size, the two models are identical.

The Steel HR is made of stainless steel and
mineral glass and is surprisingly light at 49 grams (I reviewed the 40mm
model, and the smaller model shaves off a few grams from its total
weight). Its soft silicone band has more give than many other bands you
see on wearables, which makes it easy to adjust and comfortable for
exercise as well as casual wear.

The case itself has one physical button on the
right side that controls the tiny, monochrome OLED circle display that
sits just underneath 12 o'clock. Pressing the button lets you scroll
through information including the date, time, alarms, and battery life,
as well as activity data including current heart rate, steps, and
calories. You can customize every screen in the mini display within the
Withings app. A circle of the same size sits directly below the OLED
display and acts as an analog dial of your daily activity goal. Its one
hand moves around the circle throughout the day as you exercise and
shows you how far you've gone to meet your daily goal.

Considering the Steel HR monitors heart rate
throughout the day, its battery life is impressive. It can last up to
four days in continuous heart rate mode and up to 25 days when that
feature is turned off. It's also water-resistant up to 50 meters, and
you can choose swimming as a trackable activity in its app. However, the
optical heart rate monitor embedded into the underside of the watch
won't work underwater. That's not uncommon, but as we've seen in the
Apple Watch Series 2, there are methods to keep heart rate monitors
working while submerged (even if sporadically).

The mini OLED display shows activity stats as well
as the date, time, and smartphone notifications.

Valentina Palladino

Its soft silicone band is very comfortable.

Valentina Palladino

It has an embedded optical heart rate monitor on the back.

Valentina Palladino

Its single side button scrolls through the display screens and can record workouts.

Valentina Palladino

Features: Misses the heart rate mark

In many ways, the Steel HR is a lot like Misfit's Phase,
but it has a few added perks. The Steel HR automatically monitors
steps, distance, calories, and sleep, and it takes your pulse every few
minutes throughout the day. Aside from the secondary OLED display, the
biggest difference between the two devices is that the Steel HR has a
heart rate monitor and the Phase doesn't. Scrolling to the heart rate
screen on the display using the side button will take a real-time
reading of your pulse, but otherwise the watch does this automatically
every few minutes.

The Steel heart rate monitor gave readings
that were within five BPM of my own personal estimates using a finger on
a pressure point. But that was when I was lounging around my home or
working, when my heart rate is low. During intense exercise, the heart
rate monitor was more inconsistent. At its worst, the Steel HR was as
much as 30 BPM off the Apple Watch Series 2's readings, and that was
usually when my heart rate was up to 180 BPM. Typically, my cardio
sessions are 30 to 45 minutes long, so about a third of the way through,
the Steel HR would even out. When that happened, the Steel HR was
usually within five to 10 BPM of the Apple Watch's reading—which isn't
terrible, but I've used better monitors, like that in the Fitbit Charge 2.

Thankfully, step and distance calculations
were fairly accurate and in line with the Apple Watch. There's also a
level of automatic activity recognition, but the Steel HR makes manually
monitoring a workout easy, too. Just long-pressing the side button will
make the watch go into workout mode, and you're free to do whatever
exercises you want in that time. To end the recording, you just have to
long-press the button once more.

The auto-recognition comes into play when you
sync your data to the Withings app. The Steel HR tries to decipher what
kind of exercise you were doing, and most of the time it's
successful. The watch can identify simple exercises like running, but it
gets tripped up on occasion—I didn't manually record a weight-training
session one morning, but the app recognized that my heart rate was
elevated and blocked that time off as a workout. The only problem: the
Steel HR thought I was swimming when I was actually shuffling between
different weight machines.

The Steel HR also tracks sleep, and it
differentiates light sleep, deep sleep, and waking time by how much you
move at night. In this case, it and the Phase are similar. The Steel HR
has a silent alarm if you want the watch to vibrate to wake you up. If
you don't want to use the alarm as a wake-up call, you can set it for
any time on any combination of days if you need a reminder to take
medicine, walk your dog, or anything else.

One area where the Phase has the Steel HR beat
is smartphone notifications. Withings' watch can only deliver call,
text, and calendar alerts via vibrations and flashes on the OLED
display. For calls and texts, you'll only see the name or number of the
person contacting you, and you'll know the difference between a call and
a text by the length of the vibration. For calendar notifications,
you'll see the name and time of the event on the display. The Phase
delivers those alerts and more to your wrist, including social media
messages from WhatsApp, Facebook, and more. For those who don't use
social media as much as they do regular smartphone services, you may be
perfectly fine with the limited notifications you can get on the Steel
HR. However, I would have liked to see a few other notifications since I
use other apps and programs on a regular basis.

But even if the Phase is more versatile in the
kinds of alerts it delivers, the Steel HR wins on clarity. The OLED
display makes it easy to see what kind of message your smartphone is
receiving and who's sending it to you. There's no guessing involved,
and, unlike the Phase, you don't have to memorize what a color-changing
window and moving watch hands mean. While I enjoy both methods, the
Steel HR's clever use of a small display is one of the best ways of
delivering alerts on any wearable since it keeps the alerts discreet as
well as concise.

The other perk of the Misfit Phase is its Link
feature, which lets you control external devices using one of its two
physical buttons. It's not a magic remote control for everything, but
you can control smartphone music playback, some smart home devices, and
your phone's camera with a press of a button. In my experience, this
kind of feature becomes invaluable once you find that one thing
you want to control more easily. For me, that tends to be music
playback, because I'll use any method to pause and play trackers or
change the volume that's quicker than pulling out my smartphone. But for
those who don't have that one thing they want easier control over, it's
not a necessary feature.

Listing image by Valentina Palladino

Withings Steel HR review: Classy on the outside, inconsistent on the inside
Reviewed by Bizpodia
on
19:33
Rating: 5